Re: Debian default mailer choice

[John Dow <johnmdow@me.com>]

On 17 Jul 2025, at 20:09, Marco Moock <mm@dorfdsl.de> wrote:

On 17.07.2025 19:00 Uhr Stefan Monnier wrote:

I don't have anything against Exim4 (I just happened to choose Postfix
many years ago and never had a reason to reconsider that choice).
I know basically nothing about Exim4 other than the fact that
installing Postfix instead saved a few kB (nothing very significant
in the grand scheme of things).

So here I am, wondering why Exim4 is favored this way.

It is simply a default for a metapackage, maybe you can find old
discussions about that in mailing list archives. All people who want to
install an MTA will choose one and install and configure it, regardless
of the default in the case of the metapackage.

An unconfigured MTA is useless in almost all use cases anyway and the
nasty Postfix ncurses setup during the install process is annoying,
especially if installed as a recommended packet (this existed in the
past for smartd stuff).

Aye, it’s way too big a topic for the mailing list. If you’re interested in the whole debate (as far back as 2003) you can find highlights here: 

https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/DefaultMTA

-- 
John Dow <jmd@nelefa.org>
http://www.nelefa.org
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